Mansion House Accord

Lisa Smart Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

I am sure that Ministers in the Department for Transport will have heard my hon. Friend’s words and that his buttering up will have the desired effect over the years to come. He is right to highlight the synergies between public and private investment. We need to see higher levels of public investment, which is why this Government are putting in place £113 billion over these five years. That is being done because it will deliver real, tangible progress that people can see in their streets. Why do people think Britain went backward over the last 15 years? There are lots of reasons, but high up the list is visible potholes on every single road in Britain. We are turning that around as we speak. That wider investment also gives confidence to the private sector, and we see that across the piece—wherever we are delivering regeneration projects with public sector investment supporting them, it crowds in private investment in exactly the way my hon. Friend sets out.

[Lisa Smart (Hazel Grove) (LD)]

Before I was elected to this place, I was a trustee of one of the large public pension funds, and a lot of the correspondence I received was from retired social workers who were quite grumpy about their funds being invested in extractive industry companies listed in London. We know that more young people will opt in to invest if they are comfortable with what their pension fund is investing in. What more can the Government do to engage with the industry but also with young savers to ensure there are pension options that reflect their investment preferences?

[Torsten Bell]

The hon. Lady is right to say that we see higher engagement levels among young people today in investing more broadly. Whenever I go into a school sixth form, a surprising volume of the questions are not, unfortunately for me, on what the Government are doing and how we will bring inequality down and get growth up, but are instead, “How do we make a lot of money quite quickly?” We should support that level of engagement and active investment.

On the hon. Lady’s specific point, schemes are required to set out their policy and approach, and many pension schemes provide members with options for how they wish their funds to be invested. Nothing that has been set out today on the accord gets in the way of those approaches that are already in place.